Our View: Fall River needs sustainability in school funding

On Tuesday, Fall River Mayor Will Flanagan announced that his administration and School Superintendent Meg Mayo-Brown had reached accord on a $97 million school operating budget. According to Flanagan, that $97 million operating budget proposal — $2 million less than the $99 million plan approved by the School Committee last week — would maintain a “level services” budget.

On Tuesday, Fall River Mayor Will Flanagan announced that his administration and School Superintendent Meg Mayo-Brown had reached accord on a $97 million school operating budget. According to Flanagan, that $97 million operating budget proposal — $2 million less than the $99 million plan approved by the School Committee last week — would maintain a “level services” budget.

Figuring in indirect costs — a large share of which are merely educated guesses at this point — the proposal would represent a total School Department budget of $130.2 million, about $600,000 more than the School Committee’s total proposed budget of $129.6 million.

City Administrator Cathy Ann Viveiros explained that one of the ways the city was able to find savings was through a proposed switch from a self-insured health insurance plan to a premium-based plan. But the health insurance switch is still in the exploratory stage.

Adequate funding is needed to continue the progress our city’s schools have made in recent years, but there’s only so much money to go around. The fiscal realities facing Fall River cannot be ignored either.

Just as the city side of government ought to look at ways to operate more efficiently and effectively the School Department must make earnest efforts to trim some fat in areas that do not directly affect educational delivery.

For too long, the city and school budgets have depended on what appear to be fiscal shell games. This approach is not helping to create a sustainable model for education delivery and the delivery of other crucial services. School officials must take steps toward sustainability before the rug is pulled out from under our students and our community.